The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  Trouble was, we couldn’t deny the existence of the rest of the world. The rest of the world was closing in on us. That summer Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler signed their nonaggression pact. Consternation in the left wing. Argument and confusion among the political Futurians. And a few weeks later the panzer divisions were loping through Poland.

  If Chamberlain and Daladier had stood up to Hitler in Munich in 1938, would the Nazis have collapsed? If the Czechs and the Poles had accepted Stalin’s treaty offer of aid, would they have survived as independent states? Or would it have meant going directly to Soviet tanks on the street corners of Prague and Warsaw half a decade earlier? What is Truth? I am tempted to write science-fiction scenarios, but they go in a dozen different directions, some toward a later but worse World War II and some to permanent peace and brotherhood. I doubt they are any of them realistic.

  I can only say what I perceived in 1939, colored by science fiction, politics, and my own raunchy young-male glands. Like most young males, I thought the idea of fighting in a war was scary but exciting, by no means without appeal. A year or two before, I had volunteered to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain.25 Being a soldier was only an adventure. Being a citizen of a country at war was something else. America in the 20s and 30s seemed to be exempt from that sort of European folly. Oh, now and then our Marines went down and beat the hell out of somebody in Nicaragua, but I had no idea of what it would be like to have an organized enemy bombing our cities and sinking our ships. When I observed that my science-fiction friends and pen pals in London and Paris, Ted Carnell and Georges Gallet, were now in that precise position, reason recoiled. World War? We knew what it meant. H. G. Wells had explained it to us in Things to Come. And here was the Luftwaffe pounding Warsaw as flat as Wells had smashed London in the film. It looked like the end of Western civilization, and science fiction’s nightmares were coming true.

  It was a stressful and perplexing time. The Communist Party expressed no doubts. They made a 180-degree flip-flop overnight. On one day the slogans were “Quarantine the Aggressor” and “Death to the Nazis.” On the next it was “Keep America Out of the Imperialist War.”

  It hurt. It was like being awakened from a pleasing dream by a kick in the gut. I could not change my head to keep pace with the slogans. I had grown up to hate Fascists. They had not changed. Neither had my feelings toward them. I found it more and more difficult to function as a YCL leader, or even to sit through a meeting. I knew what words I was supposed to say, but I couldn’t stand the taste of them on my tongue.

  So the YCL was in trouble with me, but I was also in trouble with the YCL. In the angrier, harsher climate that fell over the YCL after the Stalin-Hitler pact, there was a new and inquisitorial attitude toward deviationism. Who were all these science-fiction people I had invited to come into the Flatbush III YCL headquarters? At a meeting of the executive committee, an Irish youth named Marty O’Shaughnessy (my own recruit!) furiously hissed the damning question: Were any of them Trotskyites? I couldn’t help it. I laughed. And then there was the problem of Cyril Kornbluth’s morals. Cyril was only about sixteen or seventeen at the time, looked like thirty, drank like a retired railroad switchman; and he and I stayed behind at some YCL party with what was left of a bottle of wine and sang and giggled for hours. Did I not realize, the comrades asked judgmentally, that I had involved the YCL in impairing the morals of a minor?

  That was even funnier, but there was no one in the branch to share the joke. The comedy had gone out of the YCL personality. I began to miss meetings now and then. When the next branch elections came along, I was not reelected president; I wasn’t even nominated, nor expected to be.

  A year earlier that would have hurt a lot. I had started that branch. But under the circumstances at least a trial separation was indicated, if not actually a divorce; and besides, I had found something a good deal more exciting that used up all the time and attention I had.

  The great advantage of constituting myself a literary agent specializing in science fiction was not in the sparse commissions. It was in the entry it gave me to the offices of real professional editors. I could see at once that they came in all shapes and sizes. Some were wise and grizzled, some almost as young as I. Some had backgrounds stretching back before I was born; others were learning before my eyes.

  I did not hope to compete with someone like John Campbell in diligence or inventiveness, but few of the other editors I saw impressed me. To the extent that their jobs involved knowing a good science-fiction story from a bad one, I was pretty sure that I knew more than they. So I took my courage in my hands and began to shop around for a job. One of the friendliest of the editors was a man named Robert O. Erisman, veteran of many pulp titles, now experimenting for the first time with this newfangled thing of science fiction. Did he, I asked him very tentatively, think he could use an assistant with a solid background in the field, namely me?

  No, he said, gently and pointedly, he couldn’t; the budget didn’t allow that sort of thing. But maybe there was a chance somewhere else. He had heard that Popular Publications, down at the other end of 42nd Street, was adding a cheap line of pulps, half a cent a word tops. If I put it to them right, maybe they’d find a place for a science-fiction magazine on the list. Why not go talk to the boss there, Rogers Terrill?

  So I did; and Rogers hired me; and there I was, nineteen years old, and the full-fledged editor of not one but two professional science-fiction magazines.

  12 You may want to know what the first and second most frequent questions are. The first is, “How do I become a writer?” The answer is, you write. There is no other way. Intending to write, talking about writing, studying how to write, do not do the job; you actually have to keep on putting words down on paper. The second is, “How do I get published?” The answer is, you take what you have written and you send it to someone who might conceivably publish it—the editor of a magazine, a book publisher, whatever. There are other ways, but that’s the best one.

  13 I wrote a lot of poetry in those years. Cyril had a book on the various forms of poetry, and between us we tried most of the formal varieties: haiku, villanelle, chant royal, and all. I found out that a sonnet had some interior laws of its own, and after experimenting with the forms of Shakespeare and Petrarch, I tried evolving my own. Here is a sample.

  SHAFT

  Through a die one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter drawn,

  Cold when drawn, emerging smoke-hot, a metal strand.

  This and a thousand others, woven tight together,

  Attached to an electric winch and to a car.

  A hole is bored through sheets of blueprint cap.

  Created then, a steel and stonework frame to fit.

  Straight up and down three hundred feet, the pit,

  The womb of emptiness, becomes a fact.

  Then blindly humans enter, wary men, yet blind.

  Ascending viciously, they viciously go down,

  To rise, to fall, on vicious errands.

  Iron cord in iron-bound vacuum.

  Iron consciousness, inflexible and dull,

  Iron all (vicious), iron (vicious) all.

  14 Less good, maybe, at making them come out in the black.

  15 “Heavyplanet” and “Shawn’s Sword,” both appearing under the pseudonym of Lee Gregor.

  16 Later on, yes; he wrote some of the finest sf novelettes ever: Who Goes There? The Cloak of Aesir, and many others. But they were published under his pseudonym, Don A. Stuart (= Doña Stuart, his wife’s maiden name).

  17 And, in fact, I didn’t. In all of John’s thirty-four years I never sold him a story that was all my own. Fair mortified my feelings, he did.

  18 Or almost free. There was the little matter of an hour’s subway and bus ride each way from my home in Brooklyn to the Abbots’ house in Flushing, but who counted things like that?

  19 There’s a funny thing. Years later I found myself debating some of these questions with him again, only we had switched s
ides. I was in favor of writers working in other areas while they learned, and John had come to believe the corporations were withholding technology. This shows how inconsistent John was.

  20 But I think you have to be nineteen years old to survive it.

  21 One story which does survive I like pretty well: “A Gentle Dying,” a collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth. We misplaced the rough draft for years, and it only turned up after his death.

  22 Acronym, in the Esperanto alphabet, for Myrtle R. Jones.

  23 He surprised us again, somewhat later, by going on to get a doctoral degree. The only other Futurian who stayed in school that long was Isaac Asimov, and we all knew about him.

  24 From The Ivory Tower, a play by Jack Rubinson. March, 1940 (Unpublished.)

  25 They would have none of me. They needed fund-raisers in America a lot more than eighteen-year-old bodies in Teruel.

  6

  Nineteen Years Old, and God

  The office of Popular Publications was on the twentieth floor of the Bartholomew Building, at 205 East 42nd Street in New York City. The building cornered on Third Avenue, tatty street of bars and one-man barbershops, shadowed and dirtied by the El. At the other end of the block was Second Avenue, even tattier and dirtier because the Second Avenue elevated trains were older and rattlier and the whole thing was just that much farther from the real part of the city. A block farther still, just at the river, was a sudden eruption of elegance: Tudor City, luxury apartments inhabited, so my mother told me, by KWs—which is to say, Kept Women. Just north of Tudor City on the East River was a slaughterhouse.26 Sometimes on a lunch hour I would walk down to watch the river, and would see the flats come in with their cargo of sheep, and the Judas ram leading them up the ramp to the killing place. Across 42nd Street from us was the Daily News Building, with the biggest globe of the earth I have ever seen turning ponderously in its lobby. We were a block or so from the Chrysler Building and the Grand Central complex. We were, boy, in the heart of things.

  Not only was I at the very core of the Big Red Apple, but I commanded a network that stretched across the continent. Even the world. Linotype operators in Chicago were waiting to turn my words into metal. Newsdealers in Winnipeg and Albuquerque were going to display my magazines to their customers. Writers in California would tailor their prose to my wishes, artists would paint what I ordered, fans from India and South Africa would send me letters. It was a heady dose for a nineteen-year-old. I had aimed my whole life to this moment, and here I was.

  Of course, the reality was not quite so glamorous. Even then I was aware that my two little science-fiction magazines were hardly a pimple on the mammoth corpus of the pulp magazine industry. With one part of my head I knew it. With the rest of me I was just floating in joy.

  I met my colleagues with awe. To me at nineteen they seemed pretty impressive. The other editors were mostly young, if not quite as young as I; I doubt the average age was as much as thirty, even if you leave out the giggling girls from Accounting, where I never trod. But some were very old, and very wise. Just down the short hall from my own little office was Ken White, editor of Black Mask. Ken had inherited directly from Cap Shaw, who with Dashiell Hammett had shaped the modern detective story only a few years before. On the longer hallway, toward the 42nd Street side, was Janie Littell with her love pulps; heavyset ex-circus performer (so she said), she wrote a lot of the contents herself under a dozen pen names, all intensely moral tales in which there was never any touching below the neck, gobbled by an avid audience of young girls. In the other direction along the long hall were most of the other editors: Alden H. Norton (later my boss) with his sports pulps; Rogers Terrill genially overseeing all at a salary reported to be as much as Fif Teen Thous And a Year; the myriad Westerns, the dozens of detectives, the horrors, the air-wars, with their editors Loren Dowst, Willard Crosby, Mike Tilden; Aleck Portegal and his Art Department; and The Two Houses of Heaven. They were the two largest offices on the floor, and they belonged to the two men who owned the company, Harry Steeger and Harold S. Goldsmith. Rog Terrill was the fellow I had applied to, but Steeger was the one who actually hired me: courtly, youngish Princeton millionaire, who liked to yacht and to ski. He carried my typewriter into my new office, and when I said I’d rather do my own typing than have a secretary, did not burst out laughing. Secretaries got easily eighteen or twenty dollars a week. I was getting ten.

  1939 was mid-autumn in the long, glorious season of the pulps. Popular wasn’t the biggest pulp chain, or the best, but it was up there. We had more than fifty titles going at one time. The Thrilling Group had about as many. Street & Smith had fewer titles, but generally much bigger sales: they had original titles, like Love Story, Detective Story, and Western Story, not to mention the series books like Doc Savage and The Shadow. We were about Number Two to Thrilling in number of titles, and Number Three behind them and Street & Smith in aggregate sales; but there were at least a dozen other sizable pulp houses, and any number of small ones and transients. Put them all together and there were close to five hundred pulp magazines, with aggregate annual sales of around a hundred million copies.

  I learned a great deal about the pulps, but one thing I never quite figured out was who read them. There were hundreds of titles on the stands. Somebody bought them, because that’s where the money came from that paid our salaries. But you never saw a person reading one on the subway or carrying one on the street, so where did they all go? A lot of the readership, I knew, was in the small towns and on the farms, where the local movie house wasn’t as handy as in New York. But New York dealers sold a lot of copies, too.

  What was clear about the general pulp audience was that it was not finicky about literary quality, because, my God, most of the stories were awful. Even the science-fiction magazines of the time showed an awful lot of leaden prose and tone-deaf style, and they were the class of the field. The worst of modern television is not quite as brainless as the average pulp story of the 20s and 30s. And yet most of the people who edited them, and even most of the people who wrote them, were cultured and refined, as much so, at least, as their opposite numbers in the major book publishers of today. The guys who were editing Sinister Stories and G-8 and His Battle sometimes talked about Dos Passos and Alban Berg in the coffee breaks and then went back to shrieking, swooning females and the rattle of twin Vickers sluicing destruction into the Baron’s Fokker triplane. Popular was not the classiest of the pulp houses. It was a me-too operation; when Westerns were selling, we did lots of Westerns; when they stopped, we stopped. But it wasn’t the worst, by a long way. Ken White did fine things with Black Mask almost always, and there were individual writers—Joel Townsley Rogers was one—who always wrote with an understanding of the sound of the language and a care for its structure, whichever pulp they were aiming at. It was not all trash. But trash was the way to bet it.

  One reason the stories were so bad was the pathetically low rates. A penny a word is not lavish. I am a reasonably productive writer, but my lifetime average is not much more than a hundred thousand words a year (and that includes a lot of early years when I was more interested in volume than in quality, and it showed). That’s higher than most writers. It’s even higher than most pulpsters of the 1930s; but, as you can see, a pulp writer in 1939 who wrote a hundred thousand words, and sold every word of it at a penny a word, would have been blessed each week with just a touch less than twenty dollars.

  The result was that good writers got out of the pulps if they could, or, if they stayed, drove themselves to such heavy production schedules that quality disappeared.

  If you want to think of a successful pulp writer in the late 30s, imagine a man with a forty-dollar typewriter on a kitchen table. By his right hand is an ashtray with a cigarette burning in it and a cup of coffee or a bottle of beer within easy reach. Stacked just past his typewriter are white sheets, carbons, and second sheets. Stacked to his left are finished pages, complete with carbon copies. He has taught himself to type reasonably n
eatly because he can’t afford a stenographer, and above all he has taught himself to type fast. A prolific pulpster could keep up a steady forty or fifty words a minute for long periods; there were a few writers who wrote ten thousand words a day and kept it up for years on end. Some writers contracted to write the entire contents of some magazines on a flat per-issue fee, under a dozen pseudonyms; two of our air-war magazines were done that way, by a young fellow named David Goodis. Series-character magazines like The Spider or The Shadow were written by single authors; Robert J. Hogan did G-8 for us that way. At Popular most of those writers didn’t get a penny a word. Some didn’t get half that; sometimes the fee for a whole magazine was as little as $150, for as much as sixty thousand words.

  The key to survival in the pulps, the old-timers kept telling us, was volume. I schooled myself to write and sell first drafts. I would put clean white paper, carbon, and second sheet in the typewriter one time through, and when I came to “The End,” that was the last I saw of the story. It went directly to the editor. If I was lucky, a month or two later it was in print. If not, it bounced around until I had used up all the possible markets, and maybe then, and only then, I considered revising it.

  You see, it didn’t matter. The customers were not critical, and there were no rewards for virtue. Not with the readers—they were not consulted—and not even with the editors. Dependability, personal contact, and adherence to policy, those were the important considerations; literary quality came a poor fourth. And what the readers wanted—as far as I know, which is not very far—was vicarious adventure. If they could buy half an hour’s anodyne, they would not raise questions of style. Oh, I am sure that there were stories they liked better than other stories. I am even sure—it is an article of faith with me—that they could distinguish between good style and bad. But the distinction was not reflected in the cash register.